Reflections on Eid (Clap if you believe in fairies)


In my continued drive towards inscrutability, I've assembled some of my recent thoughts about absurdism, gender and shame into an interactive website. I wanted to make something that feels like how my thought processes have been working on these topics, like shuffling a deck of cards to make new associations. Check it out here:

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  <a href="/post-media/epe-baby/index.html" target="_blank">~~EPE, Baby~~</a>
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EPE, Baby


> Sound of silver, talk to me<br/>
> Makes you want to feel like a teenager<br/>
> Until you remember the feelings of<br/>
> A real-life emotional teenager<br/>
> Then you think again <br/> <br/>
> *— LCD Soundsystem,* [Sound of Silver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kmTQj8x0N8)

Yesterday I celebrated 3 years since I stepped through the mirror and started my life over as Erin. In so many regards I’m pleased with where transition has taken me: I feel my emotions so much more clearly, I’m plagued less by dissociation and depersonalization and their accompanying cataracts over my memory, my body has transformed in ways that I never thought possible. I live as a woman and recognize myself as a woman (albeit a strange one, with a mysterious past!).

And yet.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful or anything, but this year at my egg crack date I find myself sitting with impatience as I wait for the return of my adulthood. My life right now feels like the longest summer ever after high school graduation: a directionless holding pattern. Puberty still slowly burns through my body and brain, while new expectations of executive function are placed on me. All of my friends are in town but we all know life is going to take us in different directions. I really need a summer job, but I’ve been looking for months and nobody wants to hire recent graduates (especially when many employers don’t think they will stick around). I’m still working through the teenage passion of trying on new identities, so my wardrobe is a mess and I feel cringe most of the time. I want to start building something that’s going to last, lay the foundation of an adult life, but the college applications haven’t come back yet and I’m still stuck in my parents’ house.

I think this feeling is coming from a few different places. The most obvious one is the literal experience of second puberty—I don’t think there’s much to discuss other than I have another 2 years to go on that front. Another source is systemic oppression: it’s hard to feel capable when the State is weaponizing its bureaucracy against you, throwing up roadblocks at every turn, feeding into uncertainty. Power doesn’t want to contend with adequately resourced adults if it doesn’t have to, and so it makes things like employment, education, healthcare, housing and identification more and more difficult for trans people to possess. I feel lucky to have close to 4/5 of those checked off for the time being (hire me!). But lacking these things, and/or lacking assuredness in retaining these things, severely constrains my and my peers’ ability to move through the world and start making long term plans. I want to build more of a life—find a new home, restart my career, invest in some long term projects—but without being able to know what is attainable, what is a mirage, and what soon will be snatched from me, it’s hard for me to direct my energy.

Part of the experience of adulthood is a feeling of moving through time in step with the world and with the people around you. Transition smashes that feeling to bits. Many writers have outlined how trans lives often fail to adhere to mainstream temporalities because we experience a loss of cisheteronormative milestones. Our train jumps off the standard track of education -> relationships -> marriage -> parenthood -> retirement, and we keep on steaming ahead into the wilderness for parts unknown. Some people look for new milestones: get on hormones -> come out -> start voice training -> get a few surgeries -> maybe fit in some self acceptance work when the surgeries don’t solve everything. The question always comes back around: now what? I’ll admit that I still hear the siren call of the knife sometimes, but I know that another consult and wait and recovery is not what I need to move forward. To make meaning out of a life not structured by the norm can be exciting and promising, but it can also be deeply frustrating in its unresolvedness.

Paired closely with time is finesse, and the ease that it brings to one’s circumstances. Nothing is easy about gender expression when you’ve transed your gender. I was talking with a trans friend the other day who shared with me a feeling of intense gender envy that washed over her on a recent trip when she met an exceptionally put-together art curator who was about her age. For those of you not familiar with gender envy, it’s a sort of fantasizing about stepping into someone’s gender expression. Eggs and closeted gay people can sometimes confuse the feeling for attraction, when what they’re feeling is not so much a desire for the other person as for their aesthetic: outfit yes, but also mannerisms, the way they move through the world, often a perceived sense of effortlessness in a setting. It’s been three years of hard work to paper mache together a new understanding of myself, so when I meet someone similar in age who demonstrates 20 adult years of finesse, 20 years I’ll never get—the mix of longing and grief can be devastating. My challenge here is to not count that time in the eggshell or closet as a waste, to find the value that it brought me. Pining for an ease one will never have is a distraction from accepting the inherent cringe of transition into your heart, and the only way to build finesse is, unfortunately, to fuck around and find out.

The common thread that runs through all of these struggles—material instability, lack of a roadmap, the effort of showing up in the world—is a much higher level of complexity that trans people have to navigate in our lives. We have to pick our battles carefully, often without clear indicators of the likelihood of success. When I first came out, I was quick to judge some of the women around me for what I perceived as “slacking off” on fronts of transition. These days, I know better: we’re all doing the best we can to prioritize our limited energies in life, investing so much more of ourselves into just facing the demands of the world while so many cis people move forward without having to contend with the same obstacles. “Keeping up appearances” isn't an option for us, and acquiescing to that fact is the only way we can survive at all.

Not too long ago, I was out on a walk with two friends who had begun their transitions five and twelve years ago. I told them about my struggles with this feeling of perpetual adolescence, and asked if they felt like it went away for them. They both smiled, and the “elder” of the two chuckled. “yeeeah—it went away for a while, but then it came back,” he said. Not the answer I wanted to hear, but maybe it was the one I needed. Here's to three years—I'm gonna keep looking for that summer job, and managing the tasks at hand as best as I can.

World's Oldest Teenager

TV Cart Day


As senior transfem rock correspondent [@flaneurfemme](https://www.instagram.com/flaneurfemme) was stuck at home with the sniffles last night, I’m filling in on coverage of Transfemme Takeover 5, the latest show in a series running since 2023 that centers transfem-led bands and solo acts local to PDX. Yesterday’s edition took the form of an all-ages punk basement house show at [@snakefarmsux](https://www.instagram.com/snakefarmsux). The folks at Snake Farm have kitted out their basement with baffles and quality ventilation, so things didn’t get too sweaty, and the sound was unquestionably better than several “professional” venues I’ve attended in town.

[![Olivia Lyon](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7805.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7805.jpeg)

 I hadn’t been to a house show in over 10 years so I was a bit nervous that I wasn’t going to be cool enough to enter, but the door person accommodated for those of us with a deficit by giving us cobra hand stamps. (I know this is how it worked, because my dear friend and wingwoman of the night [@taylor.tldr](https://www.instagram.com/taylor.tldr) did not receive such a stamp, and instead was marked by a tally of her coolness level.)

[![Olivia Lyon](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7794.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7794.jpeg)

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First up was Olivia Lyon ([@olivviamary](https://www.instagram.com/olivviamary)) playing a solo set. Her songs were meditative, with plaintive vocals and delicate trills and progressions on guitar that started folksy but landed on sneaky jazz chords - complicated, heart rending. Digging back into her insta I see that she usually plays in trio form, and while the stripped down atmosphere was a solid opener for the night I find myself hungry to experience even more richness in her sound.

[![For You, Always For You](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7802.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7802.jpeg)

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For You, Always For You ([@foryou_always_foryou](https://www.instagram.com/foryou_always_foryou)) followed, with singer and electric banjoist Lillyn alternating between quiet moments of introspection and opening the floodgates of her voice to a deluge of anguish and grief. FYAFY was the most “punk” act of the show - raw, avant garde, stripped down to its core power. Lillyn would get into a clawhammer groove and the whole front row would start twisting and bouncing as the waves of distortion washed over them.

[![Garbage Witch](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7811.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7811.jpeg)

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You wouldn’t know that this was the debut show for Garbage Witch ([@garbandwitch](https://www.instagram.com/garbandwitch)), and I can’t wait to hear more from them in the coming months. Their style was versatile, polished, loose in a roomy way - serving up punk anthems and train beats and indie rock like nobody’s business. Garbage Witch closed with two covers, one of Ezra Furman and the other I missed in my notes, and band lead Miryam Weiss (aka. garbo) energized the already amped crowd further by teaching us to sing along with the choruses. I wanted to dance so bad to Garbage Witch but the room was packed.

[![Girl Fiend](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7819.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7819.jpeg)

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Finally closing out the night were indie rockers and TFT5 instigators themselves, Girl Fiend ([@girlfiendmusic](https://www.instagram.com/girlfiendmusic)). The musical stylings of duo Robin Cook and Elle Archer are what got me attending local rock shows regularly, and now that I’ve been to 4..? Girl Fiend shows and numerous Shaylee shows prior, I feel like I can say Girl Fiend has really found their balance since their formation last year. Shout out to Cook’s strong vocal stylings at this show in particular, and the new drummer (whose name I didn’t catch) brought the energy and tightness that their songs call for. Archer played a stripped down version of “Shaylee Baby” at one point that you could feel charge the crowd with frisson - all of us reflecting on its lyrics about that moment of early transition when you realize your life has been torn in two. Balance that with a number like the tongue-in-cheek, guaranteed-to-headbang “Cum Geyser,” and Girl Fiend’s thesis becomes apparent - voicing the emotional extremes that come from living life as proudly, unabashedly trans and queer.

[![Upcoming shows at Snake Farm](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7806.jpeg)](/post-media/transfemme-takeover-5/IMG_7806.jpeg)

It can feel like drudgery to elaborate on “how things are” right now as a trans woman in the US. But the thing is,  there are still houses being packed to the gills full of rowdy trans girls who want to dance and cheer and feel music move through our reclaimed bodies. The story of the moment is incomplete without that reality, too, and if we dwell on the state sanctioned narrative and stay home and feel scared, we will never tap into the power that comes from congregating and sharing in rage and joy and grief together. TFT5 reminded me how not alone I am, and how talented and capable transfemmes will ever be. 

Show Notes: Transfemme Takeover 5


One of the first things you learn in drawing class is that if you go to make a drawing and you find yourself creatively paralyzed by the blank page before you, there’s only one way to move forward: make a mark. It doesn’t have to be good or expressive, you just need to get something down on the paper so that its surface is no longer dazzlingly pristine. Once you’ve made a mark, it’s easier to make more marks, and then you’re off to the races with your drawing.

Since my last blogpost in November I’ve felt myself faced with a similar problem - something about the previous post felt like it brought a finality to my writing here, at least for a bit. And then I had my vulvoplasty and spent two months deep in recovery before I felt like I could write much of anything. I have done other creative work since then: a hybrid essay that I submitted to a regional zine, some tinkering with new HRT calculators, a couple bumper stickers that are currently under content review at Zazzle. 😜 Oh, and I did a little writing for friends about an anime that I watched, [Stop!! Hibari-kun!](https://archive.org/details/stop_hibari-kun_owlversion/), a light-but-complicated series about a teen trans girl in 1980s Japan. I’ve been telling myself that I just haven’t produced anything that felt like it belonged here on Human Kibble, that what I’ve been making hasn’t been as theory-oriented or personal, but looking back over the blog there have been plenty of playful, experimental entries over the past three years. I think more accurately I’ve just been hesitant to resume writing.

Recovering from surgery has challenged my relationship to my gender and to my body. I’m finding myself balking at labels, and feeling more open to playfulness with categories than ever before. Oddly, the dogshit political climate has been a part of this, too. The White House continues day after day to take potshots at trans people, especially trans women, and something about the whole exercise in conjunction with how I’m feeling about my body has been putting me in a real [Susan Stryker](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Stryker_My_Words.pdf) headspace. That is to say, as the fascists in power seek to justify the “natural” basis for our erasure and oppression, I feel less inclined to seek a natural basis for my own understanding of myself as trans:

> I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense.

> Susan Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix"

Once I started feeling sharp enough to read again, I picked up [Anti-Semite and Jew](https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/anti-semite-and-jew.pdf) by Jean Paul Sartre, which tangles with nationalist rhetoric around natural orders and identity. I’m currently reading two other books, the first is [Feminism Against Cisness](https://www.dukeupress.edu/feminism-against-cisness), a new collection of essays that challenges the idea of “cisness” as a fallacy. The second book is [Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517901738/black-on-both-sides/). C. Riley Snorton digs into the white supremacist roots of our modern conceptualization of gender, and talks about how slavery and hierarchies of racialized gender laid the groundwork for transnormative narratives about sex and gender’s malleability. These two books together are turning over rocks in my conceptions of gender, exposing all the nasty little bugs of internalized prejudice that live inside me.

In all of this, I’m continuing to look for a better way to talk about the experience of transness, one that moves beyond transnormative and medicalist cliché. When we look at the past 11 years since the “trans tipping point,” I wonder, have we articulated ourselves in a way that will suffice? Not necessarily is it “correct,” but does the common understanding of trans identity further The Agenda? And right now with how things are in the US it feels like it does not. In continuing to grow an understanding of myself I want to keep trying to describe my experiences in transness in a way that subverts systemic narratives. I’m just as vulnerable as anyone to falling into [not even wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong) patterns of rhetoric, but I’m going to keep imperfectly writing here, as I band together and care for the people around me, to try and make a mark in my own little way.

Making a Mark


Dearest babies,

Two and a half years ago I sat in support group feeling raw and new and wondered why almost no one there had been transitioning for over a year. I started to ask: where are the trans elders? I thought that maybe there was an end to transition, when suddenly everything would become easy, and vanishing into the background would become a possibility. Or maybe the elders were hiding, forced by transphobia and standards of a different time to go stealth. Maybe they just didn’t care about us, and all we had was ourselves to build the future we wanted. I worried that I - and the clutch of recently hatched eggs that I belonged to - was alone.

Babies, after every group meeting we huddled like estrogen lizards under the heat lamps of the nearby bar and schemed. We traded doctor experiences, stories of the transphobia and misogyny we began to encounter, tips for shoplifting from JCPenney. We looked at 90’s crossdresser manuals on how to be a woman, and laughed and laughed. We took bad photos of each other in the dim light, and dreamed of a Polly Pocket that, when opened, would reclaim our lost girlhoods. We started calling each other “tranny,” and “faggot,” and all sorts of other slurs, as signs of love for each other. And we started to fall in love with each other. We started to fall in love with ourselves.

After a while the support group got to be a drag, and what became more important was the socializing. Emerging from under the heat lamps, the clutch found better ways to exist with each other: dancing, live music, book groups and reading discussions, picnic lunches, MDMA-fueled cuddle puddles at birthday parties, and of course: endless bullshitting on the internet. Babies, we gradually found that we needed community more than we needed support. The support came naturally, from friendships, romances, and everything in between.

Slowly, as we swam in these new waters of being real people in the world, we started to bump into them. Other people’s transsexuals. They carried that same love that we did for each other, and all had walked paths different from us. We discovered that each encounter with a new transsexual was loaded with potential. A run-in at a pizza place could land a tgirl her own well-attended DJ night at a local bar. An online flirt could send girls UHauling across the country to form a GRS-recovery-based polycule. A chance outing to a rock show could open up a world of queer friends, all making music and incestuously swapping bandmates via Instagram group chats. Each person we met in our journeys had their own origin stories to tell, opinions on HRT, and takes on that one trans movie that came out recently.

We found ourselves welcomed by all these people into the unfolding dimensions of a trans world that we hadn't been able to see before. It turned out that we weren't alone after all, and that "elders" was a misnomer - we were surrounded by peers who were growing along with us.

Darling babies, you too will have your moment when you turn to the girl in line next to you for a beer at the taproom, the girl who you’re pretty sure you flirted with on a lex shitpost that one time, and say, “you wanna get out of here?” You’ll make out with her in the backseat of her car at 2am, finally touch a body like your own with love and lust, and realize how your body is all of you and not a meat suit like the anime told you. You’ll glimpse for a second the beautiful paradox that is feeling both monstrous and like a divine lightning being who scoffs at the gates of the underworld. You’ll find out that the girl’s ex used to date Seattle-based trans author Katherine Cross, whose book you were just reading, before the distance got too hard and they had to deescalate.

After that you’ll get cancelled over supposedly kink shaming someone on your local Discord server, and as you turn to seek support from your friends who know about kink on the *other* Discord server your eyes will open and you’ll see that you’re there. You’re on the great plateau that is the rest of your life, the long but finite Rest of Transition. You’ll look to either side and see yourself surrounded by those who went before you and those who have been beside you the whole time. And they will look back at you like someone who is not looking at a baby.

Babies, we are all feeling pretty alone right now, because times are rough and looking to get rougher. I don’t want to give you empty platitudes like the movie theater that emailed me last week, so I’ll say this: hang on to your clutch. Learn to be vulnerable with each other, and sharpen each other like a pair of knives. Take chances peeking out from under the lamps now and then, because you never know what opportunities you might find.

And above all learn to be kind, starting with yourself. It’s important to start with yourself because actions aren’t objectively kind and the safest place for learning that lesson is your own experience. You will try to be kind to yourself and you will fail and feel bad about it. You will try to be kind to others and you will fail and do the same. What matters then is what you decide to do with that failure. If you turn it into shame you will never become more kind. Listen closely to those you hurt, and own up to your mistakes. You’re a baby, you’re going to fall down and hurt yourself. It’s how you pick yourself up that counts. In time, you’ll be walking with the rest of us.

A letter to the babies in support group


It’s been nearly two weeks since I had my tonsillectomy, and it feels like my frontal lobe has finally come back online. People aren’t kidding when they talk about tonsillectomy being a hard surgery to recover from, the pain is significant at times and supposedly simple actions like sleeping and breathing comfortably can be elusive. I did a lot of laying around and playing video games or watching movies. I had hoped that there would be time to ponder and maybe even write as I recuperated, but between the fatigue and the drugs and the constant low-level pain I was in no shape for big thoughts.

My first big thought occurred as I was dropping Lindsey off at her work a couple of days ago. Sitting at a light, I thought, *Next year, when I go to the grocery store, it’s not gonna matter that I have a new vagina.* From there, I started thinking about all of the other things that won’t change for me after my vulvoplasty. *My wardrobe will be the same, I’ll live in the same house, I’ll still need to work at a job* (currently on the market, HMU). It’s kind of an obvious and mundane thought, but I found myself returning to it, and honestly it’s been unsettling in some ways and strangely comforting in others.

As much as I talk a big line about dismantling transnormativity, I fully admit that I have my own internalized transnormative narratives to reckon with. There’s definitely a part of me that’s been imagining some future Post-“The Surgery” Erin, for whom life is all roses and butterflies because she has Finished Transition. Sitting in the car and thinking about the grocery store reminded me that I’m already there, and I need to act like it - while my vulvoplasty is going to mean some big changes for me in the short term, it won’t impact everything in my life, or even most things in my life. Maybe I’ll stride through the produce section with more confidence, I don’t know. But I can’t defer my hopes and action to an idealized future self and downplay who I am in the present.

I’m considering if there are places in life where I’ve been holding back because of this. One spot that stings when I poke at it is my relationship with community. I tried last year to more actively connect with people beyond my inner circle of fellow transitioners, and I made a little progress but not much. This year my health has been my biggest stumbling block in continuing that work, but I also think I’ve been carrying some self judgment of being “in progress” when I meet new people. It’s time I moved on from this notion and worked on finding more confidence in myself with others. I have some leads on venues for writing in the coming months where I can hopefully shake things up.

I’m taking comfort in the fact that I’m there, I’ve done it, this is my life now. I’ll keep working on the rough edges, but I like who I have become and I think I can keep this thing going. Maybe this is what some of my peers have meant when they’ve talked about finding an understanding of self where they are worrying “less about the trans part, more about the woman part.” I don’t see myself stopping writing about transness and transition anytime soon, but I can see myself engaging with it in a different way, maybe with less urgency. I think I have more to say about reintegration when it comes to a future self like what I’m touching on here, but I’m only just now articulating it and need to let it marinate more, maybe live it a bit.

One thing for sure won’t change about going to the grocery store when I get my vagina: I’ll still want to be [the most fuckable person](/post-media/thetwogenders.jpg) there. 😉

Self Checkout


Jen pulled what had to be a body from the crawlspace. It was rolled up in plastic drop cloth, and trailed a dark puddle. She peeled back a layer to reveal a bloated face with a scraggly beard. Several maggots slithered out of its mouth. It was Joseph all right. The man she had replaced.

A fly grazed her lips.

She couldn’t exactly remember when or how it had happened. Flashbulb memories sometimes popped in her head of a slick hammer, scrubbing her arms in a hot shower. A confusing time period when she had looked much like he did, but slowly metamorphosed into her adult form. It was all so hazy. But life had moved on for Jen, and she soon settled into a routine that had lasted these past two years. 9am was standup for her remote backend job at a startup in Oakland. Work until lunch, pop down to the carts at the end of the block. Maybe soft call out at 4, play some video games, or if stumped on a particularly tough problem head down to the tea shop in the evening for some focus time. Jen rarely socialized with her three housemates, but she kept up her end of the cleaning necessary to maintain their rented 1920s faux Victorian home in the Sellwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Jen was quiet, kept to herself. No one had any complaints, or at least not ones they would say to her face.

Augusts in Portland weren’t what they used to be when Joseph had moved to the city, with temperatures now hitting the triple digits regularly. Jen had the house to herself that week, as her housemates had all bought tickets to Pickathon together. It didn’t bother her - much - that the offer hadn’t been extended to her, but no matter, Jen liked the solitude, and the freedom to walk around in her underwear all day. With no AC what else was she supposed to do?

Jen was about to give herself her weekly injection that Friday morning when the first fly had landed on her thigh. She went to swat at it, forgetting the syringe in her hand, and nearly haphazardly stabbed herself with the needle as the fly skittered away in a frenetic dance across her skin before taking flight. Later while typing out a message to a coworker, the fly buzzed under her nostril, then snuck behind her mechanical keyboard. She picked up the keyboard but couldn’t find it. Annoying. She finally killed the fly with a notebook against the small window in her room, but no sooner did she sit back down to her desk before another fly took its place, humming past her ear, kissing her cheek. Jen killed that fly, and another, and another. It seemed like there was always at least one ready to harass her.

Mercifully, it was time for lunch. Jen threw on some shorts and a pair of Joseph’s old Tevas and headed out to the taco cart. *I bet Willow left some food out or something,* she thought as she walked. *Wouldn’t be the first time.* The sun on 13th avenue was relentless, and the air had a slight taste of forest fire to it. Joseph’s old painter friend from Reed would have described the orangey haze as “atmospheric.” Jen remembered a night not too long ago when the two of them were drunk and the painter had made a sloppy pass at her. Frowning at the memory, she ordered carnitas from the cart, and while squeezing some limes over her tacos she noticed a fly casually wiggle its way off her in the air. *A stowaway*, she thought. After returning home, Willow’s room proved to be spotless, save for a THC vape pen on the floor that must have fallen out of their bag on the way out the door. Jen snuck a hit off it. She needed something to distract her from her growing irritation.

Returning to work, the tickets seemed dry and endless. Missing paginated responses for a query. Alphabetical sort was wrong on one of the site pages. A customer’s API key had started failing, and no one knew why. Jen got the sense that her teammates in the Bay were pretty checked out that day, nobody was getting back to her on ticket escalations. Not that Jen expected more, Joseph had taken the job as a way to slack off and it seemed like everyone else on the team had similar motivations and were probably not even working. Jen wasn’t alone, though: the flies had returned. Again it seemed to be a steady stream, understudies replacing each other one by one as Jen swatted them now and then against her increasingly guts-covered windowpane.

By the end of the workday, the flies had conditioned Jen to brush or slap at the smallest sensations on her body. A hair brushing her face, an itch, became a fly in her mind and she responded with irritation. She found herself tensing at small movements in her vision, like highlights catching the frame of her monitor. *I’m an engineer, there’s gotta be a way to determine root cause,* she thought. It was time to learn who her adversary was.

Jen downloaded a bug identifier app and used her phone to zoom in on one of the insects she had mashed against her desk. *Conicera tibialis*, the coffin fly, or scuttle fly, read her search result. From the family *Phoridae*. Known to eat decaying organic matter, these flies can dig up to two meters in the ground to enter coffins and lay their eggs within. Often a vector of disease, coffin flies are a common pest in older commercial buildings like restaurants, but almost never show up in residential settings.

*What the fuck,* thought Jen. *Is something dead in the house?*

She expanded the search to Drew and Ash’s rooms. Jen felt bad being this nosy, but how could she get anything done with this constant parade of corpse bugs dive bombing her face and hands? Intrusions into each of her housemates’ rooms turned up nothing: no food left out, no odd smells, and definitely no dead bodies. Maybe part of it was that the shot hadn’t fully kicked in yet, but there was a rage building in Jen against her elusive tormentors. These flies were really getting under her skin.

Jen examined the kitchen cupboards, using her phone as a flashlight. Nothing obvious in the hall closet, the bathroom, the mud room. She checked under the porch as best she could, and all she saw was gravel.  Jen read a tip online to put drinking glasses over the drains to see if the flies were living in the pipes, but after an hour no flies had emerged. They still managed to find their way to her, doing their weird zigs and zags on surfaces and her body before arcing away.  It was late afternoon, and Jen needed a breather. She dipped back into Willow’s room for another puff of the vape. They won’t mind.

The mail came, dropped off by the carrier through a slot near the front door that Jen thought was quaint. She went to sift through the pile of letters as a distraction. Letter for Drew, junk mail, bill for Willow, catalog for Willow, junk mail for Joseph. She blinked at that one. It was some postcard advertising a rock and mineral show he had attended five years ago, not worth the effort to correct  but now a regular annoyance she received every year. She threw the postcard in the trash, and left her housemates’ mail on the communal dining table. A fly landed on the pile, rubbing its forelegs together. Jen went to smush it but missed before it escaped.

There was one place in the house Jen hadn’t checked yet. Like all hundred year old homes in Portland, Jen’s house had an unfinished basement, with standard issue contents: an ancient washer and dryer, forgotten luggage from housemates’ past, broken musical instruments, a busted couch, and a dusty Saint Andrew’s cross left by some past kinky resident. It was almost comedic in its cartoonishness, the way a set of rickety narrow stairs with minimal head clearance led to a single bulb hanging in the middle of the room. Definitely a murder basement. Jen hated going down there, it creeped her out and made her think a little too hard about the tenuousness of her housing.

Her landlord was a white gay man in his fifties named Darryl who liked to think of himself as handy, but usually ended up prolonging repairs any time a plumbing or electrical issue came up. Jen thought about how much of a fight it was to get him to change her name on the lease, a slow motion text conversation that dragged on for weeks. For someone who prided himself in being active in the LGBTQ+ organizations in town, Darryl sure seemed to struggle to not write “Hi Joseph,” on emails regarding repairs in Jen’s room. But Sellwood was a good neighborhood, close in with food options and a grocery store within walking distance. Jen couldn’t complain about the rent and amenities. If Darryl couldn’t do something about these flies though after Jen had given it her best shot, they might have a problem. 

Watching her head as she descended the staircase, Jen reached for the light cord and found it, revealing a much greater number of flies on the basement walls as the bulb kicked on. *Gross!* thought Jen. *Whatever attracted them has to be down here.* Jen prayed it wasn’t a sewage leak, but she could smell something incredibly off-putting. After a short search she discovered a crawlspace behind the dusty cross, and from there a form wrapped in plastic. She touched it, and a cloud of flies erupted out, landing on her and the walls and skittering in a frenzy. She shouted, and startled herself with the huskiness of her own voice. Shaking the flies off of herself, Jen panicked for a good minute until she was able to catch her breath.  

Once Jen found some composure, she remembered - slowly - that this was where she had stashed Joseph’s corpse that first night they were together. This was a murder basement, after all. It had been so long since she had seen Joseph in the flesh. Photos of him were unavoidable, his name was everywhere, but it had been over two years since they had stood face to face. Now, after dragging his corpse out into the main room of the basement and peeling back the outer layer of sheeting, she found herself surprised by how frail he appeared to be. Decomposition had set in, though unevenly - she was unsure why parts of him still seemed to be moist.

Jen heard a horrible crackling sound as Joseph’s head suddenly lolled to face her. “Jen.” he said, disgorging more flies and maggots. Joseph’s voice sounded like a rustle of dry leaves. His mouth had receded into a rictus howl, “You made it.”

“What the Fuck.” said Jen. “Fuckfuckfuck-“

Joseph interrupted. “My friends found you. I need to talk to you.”

Jen frowned, and backed away a bit. “You’re dead, man. I killed you a long time ago. What the fuck more do you want?!”

“We have a score to settle. You think everything’s so cut and dry.” Joseph moved in a way that looked like he rolled his eyes, though his sockets were empty. “But it’s not.” Joseph seemed to gather himself. “You thought you took my place. Good for you. But you didn’t take everything. You left some things with me.”

Jen felt guarded, and tried to play it off cool. She feigned a laugh. “What did I leave other than that stupid fucking hoodie you’re wearing?” It was a stupid fucking hoodie, with a picture of an internet meme from 2008 on it.

“You left my problems with me, Jen. Bad habits. Traumas. Dare I say, ‘insecure attachment styles.’” The corpse wheezed in a strange way, perhaps a laugh? “You didn’t kill them when you killed me, instead you just left them down here. You may think that you’ve escaped me by looking different, sounding different, going by a new name - but when you replaced me, those problems remained inside me, and fed off of me and bred. And now everything is starting to hatch.”

“This is such fucking bullshit,” said Jen. “I don’t need to listen to lectures on emotional intelligence from a corpse. And what did you know about any of that in life, anyway? So FUCK YOU. I don’t NEED your problems. I have plenty of my own problems to deal with. Leaving the house and getting stared at, arguing with doctors, having to deal with pricks like the landlord who still think I’m you, or worse, think I’m some kind of pervert, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE. And it’s LONELY. It’s hard to trust - anyone.” Jen’s anger gained a tinge of grief. “You know I had to go no contact with Mom, right? Can you even imagine what that was like for me?”

“Boo fucking hoo,” croaked the now obviously grinning corpse. “You split my head open and dumped me down here. I have no sympathy for you. I give you my FULL inheritance, flies and all.” Joseph’s head suddenly dropped and was still. A group of flies spilled out of his broken skull and dashed in all directions across the basement floor before flitting away.

The humming in the room grew louder. *Fuck this, I’m out,* thought Jen. She made for the stairs, only to smack her head against the low ceiling in the stairway. Storming into her room and grabbing her backpack, Jen threw some clothes and her laptop inside. *I can go crash at Steph’s house tonight,* she thought. *Work on another place to live tomorrow. I can’t stay somewhere with that many fucking flies.* Before heading out the door, she grabbed Willow’s vape. What the hell, no one will be the wiser.

Stepping into the humid summer night, Jen called an Uber and waited on the curb. Joseph was Darryl’s problem now. They always got along better, anyway.

It was then that Jen heard a faint buzzing coming from inside of her chest.


Finding Yourself


*(h/t Maddie for the title)*

This past weekend [I shared my big news](/posts/a-weekend-of-opposites) about my upcoming vulvoplasty in December. Vulvoplasty - also known as zero depth vaginoplasty, since no vaginal canal is created - is a gender reassignment surgery that is growing in popularity. I want to add my voice to the number of personal accounts about this surgery by explaining why I chose it, my experiences that led me to it, and where I’m at with my feelings at the moment.

Full disclosure, this post is going to get into a fair bit about sex and anatomy and my experiences therein.

### Road to Zero Depth

When you spend so much of your life telling yourself that you are wrong to want things, it can be hard after coming out to relearn how to recognize your desires. It was about six months into transition that I was first able to acknowledge that I wanted some form of GRS. I was going through the common early HRT experience of a sex drive crash and reboot, as well as the start of the slow changes that happen to transfem genitals on HRT. All this tumult in my body made me feel like this sexless amorphous blob. Eventually I realized that I wanted to enjoy seeing and feeling my body, but my genitals just weren’t cutting it for me any more. I began looking into vaginoplasty as an option and was crushed to find that the waitlists for nearby surgeons were years long. I decided to pursue an orchiectomy in the short term and get on a vaginoplasty waitlist in the hopes that several years down the road I could have the procedure without having to go out of state.

My orchiectomy in April last year changed things for me much more than I could have expected, and I started to find increasing comfort with my own body and sex. I learned that much of my pre-transition approach to sex had centered around projection and dissociation, often deflecting from my needs by focusing on my partners’ needs in order to distract myself and my partners from paying attention to my body. I slowly started to accept that it was okay for me to want things from my body and from sex, and that my partners were more than happy to meet me where I was. Though things had improved, vaginoplasty remained my longer term goal.

After more than a years’ wait, I attended a consult for a vaginoplasty this past May. The procedure I was interested in was a laparoscopic peritoneal pull through (PPT), or as Lilith calls it, a “robopussy.”  Because the consult had been scheduled so far out I had done a lot of reading in the intervening year, and so I went into the appointment thinking that I would be familiar with most of what the PA planned to cover with me. Instead, I found myself absolutely devastated as we reviewed the surgery, potential risks, and what recovery and long term maintenance would look like. I learned that this particular approach has no advantages over penile inversion (PIV) besides maybe adding an additional centimeter of depth. It occurred to me then that depth wasn’t a priority for me, and that maybe I needed to do some more introspection about what it was that I wanted out of GRS. After the consult I felt dazed and depressed for a little while, but I decided to remain on the waitlist and do some more soul-searching and research. My next appointment before surgery was going to be the following May with surgery potentially in 2027, so I had plenty of time to reflect.

A few days after the consult, my [“Cave Girl”](/posts/cave-girl) moment helped solidify for me that I really wanted a vulva with labia and a clitoris more than a vagina. I started looking into minimal depth and zero depth options, and reached out to a couple of clinics. In a stroke of luck, the PA I had consulted with said that my surgeon also offered vulvoplasties, and that timelines would be much shorter. We scheduled a second consult at the end of August to review differences between the surgeries. Imagine my surprise when the PA ended the visit by telling me they were putting my surgery order in and that I would most likely be scheduled before the end of the year. Within a few days a scheduler reached out to me, and I had a date in December!

### Why a vulvoplasty?

I know a lot of people might ask, “why get a vulvoplasty when you could get a vaginoplasty?” While it’s true that I’m a good candidate for full-depth, the simple answer is that it's not a commitment that I'm willing to make. While neovaginas are quite impressive in their construction and function, they come with their own compromises just like any GRS. With that in mind, I’ve been trying to think about GRS less as a way to resolve dysphoria or "correct" something to be closer to a cis genital experience. Instead, I'm trying to make my choices based on what will align best with my desires. I want to be clear here that just because I don't want a vaginoplasty doesn't mean that I don't think it's a good decision for someone else to get one, it's just not the right surgery for me.

Once I understood that I needed to look at GRS from a pragmatic perspective, I started reviewing my priorities. My top priority is my experience of seeing and handling my own body, so I know that I wanted to change my external genitalia. That means getting my clit rearranged, and having labia and a shorter urethra formed. I’m not terribly concerned about how my labia are going to look, as long as they’re there. There’s a lot of talk on places like the transgender surgeries subreddit about “aesthetics” or “cis-looking vaginas,” but ever since I worked tech for the Vagina Monologues in college in order to impress a certain person who I ended up marrying, I’ve internalized the knowledge that each pussy is unique in its appearance.

My next priority is my enjoyment of sex. Loss of clitoral sensation is an outcome for some in either vaginoplasty or vulvoplasty, and for others it’s a long slow process to relearn what pleasure feels like in the clitoris. Not having to deal with a penis any more is worth the risk for me. Penetration is important for me too, but I already have a way to do that that meets my needs quite well. Damage to prostate nerves is a risk in some approaches to vaginoplasty, and other people report reduced prostate response after vaginoplasty once the canal is in place between the prostate and rectum. Some surgeons doing minimal depth vaginoplasty (just inverting penile tissue, no dilation needed) attach the smaller canal to the prostate to enable easier stimulation, but I worry about long-term risks there. Given that I’m making big changes to my clit, I want to preserve at least one reliable avenue to pleasure, and for me that means leaving my p-spot be.

Lastly, I don’t want to deal with the maintenance of regular dilation of a vaginal canal. Plenty of women say that it’s not much of a concern most of the time, but the truth is I just don’t want to have to think about it. If I were incapacitated in some way I could lose depth by neglecting regular dilation, which could lead to further health complications. With my migraines and my chronic illness, my body requires enough maintenance as is. Thankfully if I realize later on that I would prefer a canal, I can still get one installed in a followup surgery. It won’t be as easy or affordable as a one-shot, but it’s nice to know that it’s not entirely off the table.

### What’s Next

The next few months are going to be filled with a lot of anxiety and excitement for me as I prepare for my surgery and the weeks of recovery that will follow. I recognize in my gut what has become a familiar nervousness in my transition, that feeling of sizing up the chasm before the required leap of faith. It might seem like a contradiction to say that I feel confident as well, but I’m pretty sure that until they roll me back into the operating room and knock me out I’m going to be sitting with some anxiety no matter what. I’m confident in that I feel like I’ve done my due diligence in understanding my options for GRS, and in the steps that brought me to choosing vulvoplasty I’ve grown in my understanding of myself and how to recognize my desires. All of GRS is a compromise, but I’m compromising on my terms.


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